Reviewing the changes, accomplishments and trials for the past 35 years, and pointing to the obligations of the future, Dr. Leo M. Franklin preached his thirty-fifth anniversary sermon to Temple Beth-El.
Reminding his congregants that his pledge 35 years ago was “to give you and the sacred cause for which you stood the best energy that was in my mind and soul and spirit-this and nothing more,” he pointed out that he stepped into a polpit that had been dignified by men like Liebman Adler, Kaufman Kohler, HenryZirndorf and Louis Grossman.
Describing the “vast and sweeping changes that have come upon the world during the period covered by our survey,” Dr. Franklin paid a glowing tribute to the late Isaac M. Wise, founder of the Reform Jewish movement in this country and organizer of Hebrew Union College.
“I say to you now and here,” he declared, “that had the Hebrew Union College not come into existence through the inspired constructive genius of Dr. Wise, it is very questionable whether Judaism could have survived in this country the bitter and unceasing onslaught of those who challenged its validity alike from the standpoint of science and of ethics. Neither those rabbis whom the pogroms of 1883 had brought to these shores in such numbers from Eastern Europe, nor that splendid group of German origin, men of the type of Einhorn and Geiger and Samuel Hirsch, intellectual liberals though they were, could have caught the imagination of American youth and set it aflame with that spiritual passion that we needed if the Torah was indeed to become a tree of life, whose way was the way of peace.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
